Tuesday, December 12, 2017

They do, however, believe in their ability to pull the wool over your eyes, and if recent history is any indication, maybe they have good reason to continue as they are. All too many of you, it seems, do believe in the credit fairy, that lies are truth, and that no matter how self serving the Republicans are, they can be trusted in serving your interests.

How many decades have we been trying trickle down? Three or four at least, across several GOP, and Democrat administrations, and all we have to show for it is the actual fiscal situation that we are in now. Which is, of course, awful, despite nearly full employment: tremendous national debt; horribly lacking investments in critical infrastructure. Virtually all state, and local municipalities, suffering from ever diminishing revenue sources, so that most of the services that government is supposed to provide and help us with (education, health care, extreme weather event destruction and restoration, etc) are as missing from action as that supposed credit fairy.

And then, of course, is the other side of the equation. Their power masters have grown exponentially in their ability to not only influence elections through the new insanity of campaign financing laws, they spread their reach and influence through ever widening corporate concentration of ownership so that not only do they control whether you will get hired or not (wherever, for whatever wage), they expand their ability to control all means of information dissemination so that the only reality you know is the one they want you to know; whereupon, certainly, you then become as apparently easy to convince of things such as credit fairies, or that trickle down might actually work if just just continue to wish for it strongly enough. So if you are wondering why these people continue with spreading this horse feces wonder no more.

Sunday, December 10, 2017

First, when the FBI was giving them everything they wanted to hear, that was bad, about Clinton, they praised the agency, and its investigators.

Then, after getting caught lying about not meeting at all with Russians, as well as more lying about what the meetings were supposed to be about; with everybody apparently knowing about the lies, before, and after, the scapegoat firing of their new National Security Advisor, finally resulting in indictments, and guilty pleas for lying to the FBI; not only is collusion suddenly not a crime (even though you may well be engaging in acts of criminal conspiracy, not to mention the little detail of betraying the interests of your nation), the agency you lauded for helping you win the election is now "corrupt," and full of impeach the president extremists.

You can't even call this BS, as that would be giving BS a very bad name.

The neverending, connected, self-serving lying that these people do comes to seem like it's nothing more than breathing to them. A way to keep a special kind of oxygen to their brains. A way to keep them functioning, in an almost human like way.

I do not know which sickens me more: the venal predictability of it, or the sick sustenance they seem to draw from it. But the one thing I do know is we need to be ready to put resolute pressure on Congress to protect the Judicial branch of our government from this disgusting example of corruption personified, trying to steal truth out from under reality.

When will will any of you understand. We do need the free flow of information, but now that experience has been electrified, and with it skills retrieval, money is information. And now that this is so we must confront the reality that the economic operating system that makes money possible is obsolete precisely because it does not make sense any more. And that is why no one has a living wage.

Only by reorganizing ourselves to set things up so that we completely redefine what work is, so that we can redefine what production, and equitable distribution of same, is, only then will we be able to address all of the economic insanity we face. Only then will will also be able to address all of the environmental, and social problems we face; because then we will be able to approach those problems in the sense of what is the effort required to solve them, as opposed to what is the abstract "cost." So that we can then start to get beyond the idea of who pays, and who benefits.

Friday, December 8, 2017

You have to be wondering, right about now whether, "Vlad The Not So Glad" is beginning to doubt his ability to pick corruptibles.

Sure, he has has scored on a couple of fronts. Tremendous new disarray in our political process (which, mind you, was going in that direction anyway). And a lot of doubt now about what we can, and cannot trust, about a number of institutions; the majority of which, of course, though laid low by decades of fiscal abuse, are a lot more trustworthy than the prime proponents of mistrust would have you believe.

On the downside for him, though, is quite a bit as well.

Because now we can talk quite clearly on the subject of sanctions, and how the prospect for their removal has become quite problematic to say the least. One might imagine, in fact, that this front might become a good deal more elaborate now that the "Vlad Be Bad" machine has been identified operating in so many other places; of which the Nato nations of Europe have become only too frustratingly clear on. One can only wonder then, what new difficulties might be in store for him; especially if new a breath of semi fresh air gets blown into Congress with the coming midterm elections. We might, perish the thought, take the lead again in unifying Nato, as well as what Nato stands for, and suggest a lot of things, that all of us together, can try to be sure will hit "Vlad Be Sad's" cashing in machine; of which new banking, and financial transaction rules might make a really big dent in, just for starters.

If the new guys are imaginative, though, they won't stop there. Just think, for instance, what would happen to the price of oil if we announced a new partnership program to co-develop sea based, Yen Tornado Turbines; very large wind turbines that would make producing mass quantities of liquid hydrogen quite efort effective. And what if, in combination with that, we also did another public works project that would allow us to have the massive air logistics it will take to widely distribute this new fuel to all who need it around the world; doing both of these initiatives as new, world public, power, and transportation utilities; utilities that would not operate on a for profit basis. All we would need to do is secure a partnership with Europe, China, the rest of the pacific rim, as well as with as much of the rest of Asian sub continent as we could, to make oil be the isolated substance, of limited usage, it should be. If we did that, I feel pretty confident that the price of oil would have significant other incentives for doing anything but going up anymore.

We could, of course, also get even more creative still. And this relates to a post I did nearly a year ago at least, I think.

I got the idea from reading a news report about the corruption problem in Moscow. The local corruption interest group there had issued a new report on just how bad corruption is now in the capital. And on that note, also issued their new corruption misery index. And boy did the lights go on for that one.

Wouldn't it be cool if our government, and every other trading partner we have, suddenly started charging import tariffs on Russian exports (most especially oil, or anything that "Vlad The Had" has his fingers in). Whereupon we then peg the rate of those tariffs on some overall Russian, corruption misery index.

But hold on now. We can't stop there either.

What we would have to do to follow through properly with this would be to have all parties concerned in collecting the money agree to spend it on refugee relocation efforts; especially as it relates to the fallout from Syria, and any place else the Russians have been stirring the pot in this regard; and then, just to put a bit of moral superiority on it, the same nations also agree to match such expenditures.

Wow. Would that be a propaganda bonanza, as well as a possible, real solution to the refugee problem? I, for one, have to thinks so.

In any case, though, "Vlad The Mad" has to be wondering if, just maybe, it's time to cut his losses on what is now quite likely to become a real feces storm storm him. Time will tell I guess.

Worse yet is the fact that, because the masters of money can see this sort of thing only as another cost factor, and as the recent "Tax Everybody But Us Bill" makes quite clear, dementia, in their minds, is just another fact of life (kinda like starving children everywhere, or sexual slavery, I guess) now; and as such it's everyone for themselves, and the devil take the hindmost.

On the upside here, though, you can at least see why they are so keen to accumulate the crazy kinds of monetary reserves that they are amassing. However cold and inhuman it may be, it is certainly quite logical; at least in a quite narrowly focused way.

The question for us now is how do we change this narrow focus, as well as the blind acceptance that crazy has to be a fact of life at all. And to do that I think will require taking back direct responsibility for our own Democracy.

Americans "are in greater pain than citizens of other countries" and have been growing steadily more miserable for decades, according to a new working paper by David G. Blanchflower of Dartmouth College and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick.

Wednesday, December 6, 2017

...simply to get more numbers; which of course is how a lot money is being created now without regard either to its efficacy as an investment approach (and why shouldn't we hold money to the same performance standard we used to hold labor productivity to), or to its environmental inefficiencies.

The other interesting thing of course is the mere fact of how easily we accept the imaginary aspect of money creation in the first place; allowing ourselves to put belief in assumed "stored value" even when we put the creation process into the ether of electrons and their wild flights through now barely conceivable circuit paths.

Since we really don't need money any more in the first place (because it's just another form of information), it's amazing to me the lengths people seem ready to go to keep this fantasy alive. Not to say, though, that there may well not be other, very useful things we might want to do with Blockchain technology. For instance, maybe blockchain is the way we should treat all posts to the internet. And then all subsequent comments on the originating posts, as transactions to them, just like they were going to do with the information in its guise as money. Perhaps that might be a way to thwart all of this bogus interaction with anything of an ideology, political, or religious nature. Just a thought.

About Me

I am retired now, but I used to make my living as a Systems Analyst\Developer.

As my real passion has always been ideas, writing, reading, social change and music I am devoting myself to all of these. The primary focus, however is on social change.

It is my firm belief that Capitalism is obsolete. It has been rendered so because of electrified information systems. Not only do these make human skill as a commodity absurd, they also turn information into money, and money into information. At the very least, this reality makes representational Democracy virtually impossible because it can longer move freely. As a commodity it is necessarily subject to the net gain requirement in any exchange. As such information flow is seldom conducted for the benefit of the receiver.